Hospitalists would tend to agree that it’s great that medical journals are published every month to provide clinicians and healthcare practitioners with new research findings and perspectives that can help them take better care of their patients.
What isn’t so great? There just isn’t time to read them thoroughly.
This is why Progress Notes exists. The articles—a regular feature of the Journal of Hospital Medicine (JHM)—summarize recent findings on important clinical topics and deliver a message that hospitalists can put right to use in their care—all in only about two or three pages of text, not including citations.
Dr. Shaughnessy
“We really wanted to have some very short, focused articles that a busy hospitalist could pick up and quickly get up to date in a content area,” said Erin Shaughnessy, MD, MSHCM, chair of pediatric hospital medicine at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, who has been editing Progress Notes since it debuted in 2019.
In addition to Clinical Progress Notes, the journal also publishes Methodological Progress Notes, which are similar in length and meant to quickly familiarize readers with research methods that are seen in original research articles published in JHM.
“We want readers of the journal to be able to understand the research articles that are published in the journal,” Dr. Shaughnessy said. “We want to make our journal more accessible to all hospitalists.”
Dr. Kinnear
Benjamin Kinnear, MD, MEd, associate professor of med-peds at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, who works with Dr. Shaughnessy on editorial review of Progress Notes, said he was a fan of the articles before being asked to become an editor for it, and implements their content in his care.
“I think JHM’s Progress Notes provide an easily digestible review of the most recent information on topics that are salient to hospitalists,” he said. “So when the opportunity arose to be part of the editorial team focusing on this type of article, I couldn’t pass it up. I learn so much with each article.”
Both Drs. Shaughnessy and Kinnear said they use the articles in their teaching, because they are a way to convey key information efficiently.
“I’ll pull it up and send it to them, and the learners love it because it’s this brief condensed article of some important things that they need to know,” Dr. Shaughnessy said.
Dr. Kinnear called them “a great teaching resource for hospitalists who work with residents and medical students, providing a focused, quick read for busy learners on topics relevant to patients they may be caring for.”
In one recent Clinical Progress Note, for example, the authors addressed a topic that has had evolving evidence reported in the literature. Corticosteroids are not routinely used to treat community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), but some of the literature has shown mixed results on their efficacy. In the article, the authors quickly summarized the discrepant messaging in the literature, then focused on a large, recent study—with 800 patients with severe CAP across 31 centers in France—that found that hydrocortisone led to lower mortality and intubation rates and other improved outcomes compared to placebo. They determined that, in the right patient population, steroids can be used as an adjunct therapy, as long as clinicians bear in mind the study’s inclusion criteria when making their decisions.1
Dr. Kinnear said one recent Clinical Progress Note that stood out was on caring for hospitalized autistic adults, written by Dr. Thomas Pineo. Dr. Pineo wrote a companion piece about his own journey of recognizing that he is autistic as an adult.2,3
This is why Progress Notes exists. The articles—a regular feature of the Journal of Hospital Medicine (JHM)—summarize recent findings on important clinical topics and deliver a message that hospitalists can put right to use in their care—all in only about two or three pages of text, not including citations.”
“I thought both pieces were incredibly useful, poignant, and well-written,” Dr. Kinnear said. “They helped me understand how I can do a better job caring for neurodiverse patients and supporting neurodiverse medical trainees.”
Dr. Shaughnessy said that a Clinical Progress Note on high-flow nasal cannula therapy for bronchiolitis was particularly popular. It “helped people really understand where high-flow oxygen is indicated for bronchiolitis and where it isn’t. It had become a very popular therapy and was used in a lot of different hospitals, and probably overused. And since then, there have been efforts and studies to reduce what’s called overuse of the therapy.”4
One of the most popular Methodological Progress Notes, she said, covered scoping reviews, a type of review that seeks to map out the landscape of a topic. It became one of the journal’s most cited articles, she said, running alongside an actual scoping review on drug loss and theft.5
“After we publish Methodologic Progress Notes, we start to see people just become more familiar with those methods and use them in their articles, which is also great for the journal,” Dr. Shaughnessy said. “We’re making the research article type more accessible to a larger group of authors, I think.”
Dr. Shaughnessy said there are at least six Progress Notes articles published each year. Sometimes, editors seek out authors they know are authorities on a topic of interest, and sometimes, articles stem from proposals made by writers. Interested writers can email proposals to [email protected]. Two peer reviewers, and sometimes three, are chosen to review each article.
“I don’t think we’ve ever accepted a submission at face value,” she said. “There’s typically dialogue back and forth with the authors—between the reviews, the editor, and the author—to really refine the writing to make sure it’s reflective of the evidence and also concise in answering the question the reader will want answered.”
Carefully choosing writers and topics is crucial to the success of the series, she said. If a proposal for a Clinical Progress Note is on a topic that hasn’t had much new evidence published in the last three to five years, it likely wouldn’t be accepted. If an idea for a Methodological Progress Note covers a method that hasn’t been used in JHM articles, or at least is particularly encouraged to be used, it probably wouldn’t make the cut, she said. The idea is for the series to be a time saver, but in a way that is relevant to hospitalists’ work.
“As a clinician, I can tell you it would take a long time to digest the primary literature on a topic, which would include trials, in addition to the reviews and things, and come up with an overarching conclusion about what to do for the patient. It would just be extraordinarily time-consuming on an individual clinician basis to do that,” she said. “Having a really thoughtful author do that just gives the time, essentially, back to that clinician to go take care of patients.”
Tom Collins is a medical writer based in South Florida.
References
- Hibshman M, Anderson ML. Clinical progress note: steroids in severe community-acquired pneumonia. J Hosp Med. 2025;20(1):58-61. doi:10.1002/jhm.13473.
- Pineo T. Clinical progress note: caring for hospitalized autistic adults. J Hosp Med. 2024;19(6):520-523. doi:10.1002/jhm.13307.
- Pineo T. Have you considered autism? J Hosp Med. 2024;19(6):542-544. doi:10.1002/jhm.13270.
- Piper L, et al. Clinical progress note: high flow nasal cannula therapy for bronchiolitis outside the ICU in infants. J Hosp Med. 2020;15(1):49-51. doi:10.12788/jhm.3328.
- Sucharew H, Macaluso M. Progress notes: methods for research evidence synthesis: the scoping review approach. J Hosp Med. 2019;14(7):416-418. doi:10.12788/jhm.3248.